The shame of our police barracks

Even by Nigeria’s standards, few events have evoked as much shame as the decrepitude at the Police College, Ikeja,recently unmasked by Channels Television under the dynamic leadership of our former student, John Momoh.

But early official reactions came close.

After seeing with his own eyes the decay that has overtaken the facilities and the degradation that is the lot of the students at the College, a discomfited President Goodluck Jonathan reportedly turned to one of its senior officers and demanded to know how the media “penetrated” the place. He went on to gripe about how the disclosures had given his Administration a bad image.

It certainly did not enhance the Administration’s image any more than Dr Jonathan’s recent CNN interview with Christiane Amanpour did. By its serial failures on a broad front, by its actions and even its inaction, the Administration has given itself an image so unflattering that its most resourceful adversary will have to work exceedingly hard to make it less appealing.

As regards “penetration,” it is as if the college was a fortress, a depository of classified state secrets that must be kept off-limits to prowling journalists and other “spoilers.” It made no difference that its huge compound was often rented out for owambe carousals to just anyone who can pay, which may well include the drug barons and Four-One-Niners the police should have put out of business long ago.

The college and the sprawling barracks in which it is located were, pardon the cliché, hiding in plain sight.

From the road leading from Maryland to the domestic airport, one of the busiest in the nation, you could see a row of residential quarters with peeling paint and broken light fixtures and nondescript washing hung out to dryand all manner of junk piled high on many of the balconies. If this was the face of the barracks fit for public viewing, it was not hard to imagine the decrepitude within.

Nor is the rot limited to the Police College in Ikeja. It hits you between the eyes in Ijeh especially, with police barracks in Idi Oro, alongWestern Avenue, at Sabo and Pedro just a shade less decrepit. The Falomo Barracks that used to be something of an exception has now been turned into a seedy market spilling over into the streets, with no consideration for security.

For sheer hideousness, however, the police barracks at Ijeh has got to be the frontrunner. By some accounts, when Police Affairs Minister, retired Navy Captain Caleb Olubolade paid an official visit to the barracks early in October 2011, he got an earful of pathetic stories of misery arising from the dilapidated conditions of the housing facilities from the traumatised wives of the residents.

No running water. No electricity. No toilet facilities. Threat of flooding, with the risk of being attacked by reptiles.

No remedial action followed.

In the face of the latest disclosures, Olubolade has taken a leaf from the repertory of Ms Deziani Alison-Madueke,the beleaguered but untouchableMinister of Petroleum Resources,an institution mired irretrievably in syndicated sleaze. He hurriedly empanelled a commission to inquire into how funds earmarked for police colleges over the years were spent, apparently in a pre-emptive bid to absolve himself.

The panel, which has just one week to submit its findings, is made up almost entirely of officials of the Ministry and the police establishment. It includes no independent outsiders. This is hardly the most reassuring way of getting at the truth, but there you have it.

Practically every Nigerian motorist has a story about being shaken down by the police. The process could be benign, such as when they call you by some flattering designation or ask after your family.

My friend and former colleague Sully Abu once told me of how an armed policeman emerged literally from nowhere and frantically flagged him down at an unmarked check point. Abu stopped, and the policeman ran up to the car. Abu wound down his car window, brought out his vehicle identification papers from the glove box and handed them to the policeman, wordlessly daring him to find anything amiss.

The policeman shook his head, like a person who had been grossly misunderstood.

“No be for this I stop you, now,” he said. “I just want to wish Oga merry Christmas.” Abu rewarded the policeman’s solicitude with a N50 note. It sent him into a rhapsody.

Sometimes, the solicitation could be brazen, such as when the policeman lapses into a prolonged yawn and tells you he has not eaten all day, or when he says he needs money to buy batteries for his flashlight.

The policeman – for it is usually the men who operate in this manner — may well be telling the truth. It is no longer a secret that policemen and policewomen have to pay a bribe to get their equipage and other statutory entitlements. They probably paid a bribe to be recruited in the first place,to be promoted, and thereafter to enjoy the benefits commensurate with their new ranks.

Nor is it anymore a secret that they are assigned to or retained on “lucrative” beats on the strict understanding that they will deliver appropriate returns to their superior officers.

Can they reasonably be expected, then, to be more upstanding than the institution that recruited them, trained them, and nurtured them?

The rot goes a long way back, to be sure, and the degree of Olubolade ‘s culpability will have to be measured only from the time he was appointed Minister; A long line of former ministers and inspectors-general and chairpersons of the Police Service Commission will have to be summoned to render an accounting.

It is time, too, to reopen the case of the Police Equipment Fund, for which one-time presidential brother-in-law Kenny Martins and his associates harvestedN300 billion from compulsory deductions from local government funds and from other sources. Of this haul, N200 million was squandered on an Arabian Night feast. The balance went for the most part to serve dubious causes, or disappeared without trace.

I take that back. Some of it went toward creating the illusion of accountability. A helicopter that was presented as a glittering purchase from the Fund and flown around Lagos briefly, to the delight of the police high command who thought they had acquired a strategic asset for fighting crime, found its way back several days later to the Ukraine – or was it Kazakhstan or Kyrgyzstan — from which it had been rented for display.

Finally, it is time to proceed with greater resolve to recover the N42 billion-Police Pension Fund that was looted by its custodians and their confederates in high places.

It would be cruelty most unspeakable if the policemen and policewomen who have suffered so much abuse and degradation during their years of service to find on retiring that they had been swindled right to the end.